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"Today Meta tags are possibly the most misapplied aspect of search engine optimization."*

Did you know that meta tags are not an easy solution to boost your search engine ranking? Putting every keyword you can find into you meta tags WILL NOT help your pages ranking! The actual content of the page will improve your search engine ranking not the number of tags you list. So what do meta tag do anymore?

If you are reading this article chances are you already know that meta tags are hidden text in the header that will not be rendered by the browser. The meta tag was intended to allow the webmaster to add relevant keywords that could be used by search engines when indexing a page. However, much abuse of meta tags (listing irrelevant tags to simply improve search engine ranking) has resulted in the meta tag becoming practically irrelevant.

Now meta tags simply offer the website owner some control over how their web pages are described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed.

Below is a list of the most common/ useful meta tags:

Robots tag:
Controls Web robots on a per-page basis. (example: ) You can learn more about how to create your robots tag at: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/me ta-user.html

Description tag:
A short, plain language description of the document, some search engines use this text for their description of the particular webpage. (example: ) The description tag can only be 170 characters with spaces and should be a simple summary of the page

Title tag:
Is not really a meta tag but it's like one. (example: title goes here ) The title tag will appear at the top of the browser window and it will also be saved when users bookmark the site. The title tag should be 5 - 10 words, including the company name and any relevant keywords. It can only be 90 characters with spaces.

Note- For SEO (search engine optimization) It is beneficial to include the main keyword phrase for the page in the title area, in the main H1/H2 headlines and in the first regular paragraph of text.

If you are looking to improve your search engine ranking you should spend lots of time developing informative, relevant content for your pages and you should learn more about keyword/ key phrase density. Keyword/ key phrase density and relevant content are the best ways to ethically improve search engine ranking! For more info on SEO and free classes visit: http://www.gnc-web-creations.c om/seo-optimization.htm

* Quote from: http://www.pandia.com/optimiza tion/SEO-metatags.html

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